Everyday movement, p.5
Everyday Movement, page 5
In fact, Ah Mak had told her in advance that he’d need to leave early that day for his grandfather’s birthday banquet. They hadn’t expected the peaceful assembly to turn into a violent crackdown. She also knew, when danger struck, he had taken her hand and took her to a safe place. He had taken care of her immediate needs and urged her to leave with him. She knew, deep down, that leaving now was the rational choice. Yet, sorrow overwhelmed her. She didn’t want to just go home as if this were just the end of another date.
Ah Mak wasn’t in the wrong, she realized. But on those nights when she woke up in tears, haunted by the horrific memories from Tamar Park—the thuds of rubber bullets, the shrills from the terrified people, the smell of tear gas, the oppressive heat, along with the image of Ah Mak disappearing into the crowd—Chan Yuek concluded that this tangled knot of pain could only mean one thing: Ah Mak didn’t love her enough. No one had loved her in the way she wanted.
* * *
—
By mid-August, the broad avenues of the city were like freshly pressed shirts, straight and hot. On the roadsides, metal manhole covers bloated from the heat. Pedestrians avoided treading on them for long. Perhaps they feared doing so might trigger some long-repressed echoes from the underground. Silently, they walked, half a beat slower than usual, as though they were stepping on invisible tails of their own shadows. It was hard to tell where the restless fatigue of the heat ended, and where the stifling dreariness for the movement began.
One early afternoon, yet another protest descended into violence. This time, it was in Causeway Bay, on the north side of Hong Kong Island. The shopping district that rivaled Oxford Street in London was transformed into a battleground. As the police and protesters played cat and mouse, the street was covered by objects left behind by their panicking owners: helmets, umbrellas, masks, bloodied bandages, and single shoes. The police had set up roadblocks in the area to trap their counterparts in a cage. Chan Yuek searched for an escape route on her phone. Since the movement began, people had started social media groups for this purpose. In these groups, volunteers acted as virtual sentries, uploading real-time reports on traffic and police presence across the city. Chan Yuek exchanged intel with a few other female protesters she had met that day and they decided to head east toward Quarry Bay, where it would be easier to slip through the police blockade.
To avoid the roadblocks, the women negotiated the back alleys. Chan Yuek knew these streets by heart. About twenty minutes later, as shops turned into residential buildings, they arrived at the edge of Quarry Bay. One woman in the group suggested that they change out of their black clothing and protest gear first. The group went into an empty public restroom, leaving one person keeping watch outside. Standing by the sink, the women wiped away the sweat and saline water from their skin before stripping off their outfits and changing into clean dresses. They quickly rinsed their goggles and helmets under the faucets to dull the stench of tear gas.
They went through this routine with efficiency that came from practice. When they were almost done, a tall woman broke the silence by asking if anyone had a spare hair tie. She had lost hers earlier in the commotion of the escape. Chan Yuek loosened her ponytail and handed the woman a purple scrunchie with an oversized bow on it. She had no qualms about giving it away. She had picked it up from Ho Sam’s nightstand. It must have been left behind by another female companion of his.
Chan Yuek carefully arranged her canvas tote: Her black clothes and protest gear were stuffed at the bottom; sitting atop of them were a makeup pouch, a bottle of green tea, and some wet wipes—she was just an ordinary young woman out shopping. Having finished her transformation, she left the bathroom on her own and walked two blocks before catching a double-decker bus. On board, she scanned the streets for police roadblocks and didn’t see any. Finally able to relax, she climbed the stairs to the upper deck and settled into a window seat where she drifted into drowsiness.
It was a little past four in the afternoon, but the sunlight was still intense. Chan Yuek looked through the window and was surprised to find everything on the street in a blur.
As the bus went by, the shop signs appeared to be wavering, and the pedestrians looked like ghostly silhouettes. The world seemed tipsy. Or was it her? Chan Yuek put her hand over each eye, and realized the cause wasn’t any kind of drunkenness. Her left contact lens must have fallen out.
About an hour later, the bus pulled into the dimly lit terminus. She was still groggy. When she got up, the entire upper deck was empty. Outside, the dusk was thickening, and a chill crept in. She felt as if the blurriness surrounding her were a grayish-blue flood threatening to sweep the bus station and swallow her whole.
From time to time, she often found herself in an odd state of dejection.
Last week, she spent some time at Ho Sam’s place. After they had sex, she wanted to linger under the covers to bask in the tenderness. But Ho Sam got up and jumped into the shower, leaving her alone in bed. Looking for distraction, she turned on the TV to watch local news live updates. In one district, tear gas was fired; in another, dozens of young people were arrested. In a close-up shot, she saw that some of them looked so young they were practically children. Their faces were bloodied. Before being hauled into police vans, they shouted out their own names to the camera.
Chan Yuek knew they did so for practical reasons. Typically, after a protester was arrested, her family or lawyer wouldn’t be notified until several hours later. By then, physical beatings or a forced confession might have already taken place. By shouting out their names, the young arrestees were trying to get timely help. But Chan Yuek felt they were also making some kind of declaration to the world.
Ho Sam came back to bed after toweling himself off. He kissed her on the cheek. When she didn’t respond, he sat by her side and watched the news. A few minutes later, he wanted to change the channel and reached for the remote control. Chan Yuek, still naked under the sheets, tightened her grip on it, refusing to surrender. She fixed her eyes on the TV screen, unaware of a faint red kiss mark on her shoulder blade.
Ho Sam sighed and stepped out to the living room to grade his students’ homework. Chan Yuek breathed out in relief, curled up, and hugged her knees in the bedroom. Tears silently slid down her cheeks. She held back sobbing. She had seen Ho Sam’s gentle side. When he inadvertently made her cry, he apologized endlessly, and fussed over her with sweetness, as if she were the flesh of his own palm.
But that wasn’t what she wanted.
However lovingly Ho Sam and Ah Mak once cared for her, in moments she needed them, they got up and left. All she wanted was for someone to stick around, to hold her, to keep her company in witnessing these changes washing through the city, on-site or on TV. Was this too much to ask for?
* * *
—
Chan Yuek’s thoughts kept returning to that day at Tamar Park when her life was on the cusp of being turned upside down. It was her first time attending a peaceful rally. At twenty, her ideas of large-scale social movements had been vague. Sure, she remembered the Umbrella Movement from five years ago, when protesters occupied the financial heart of the city for months to fight for direct elections, or “One person, one vote,” as the slogan went. But she was still in junior high and barely kept up with the news. She recalled a well-known photo, which ended up gracing the covers of several foreign magazines and newspapers. It showed a man in a surgical mask, holding up a pair of umbrellas, standing alone amid smoky air.
At the park, as she ran with Ah Mak, she thought of that photo again. The man in the still had impressed her as heroic, but only on that day, she came to know the viciousness of the smoke in the picture. She too had been tear-gassed.
Chan Yuek and Ah Mak joined the crowd moving across the park toward the waterfront promenade. There was only a narrow path flanked by meticulously planted flower beds. Incredibly, everyone slowed down and lined up in single file, waiting for their turn to pass through. Like Chan Yuek, most of them hadn’t known what chaos looked like, and were unfamiliar with this new world, where disorder was to become routine. Years of civic education had instilled such a deep sense of propriety in these citizens that even in a moment like this, their instinct was to remain courteous, yielding to one another and unwilling to trample the plants.
“Why are we lining up? The cops are coming after us, and you’re worried about stepping on the plants? Worried about public decency?” a man shouted in frustration as he stomped straight through the flower bed. Instantly, he opened a floodgate. People ran on the flower beds, snapping leaves, stalks, and buds and trampling them on the ground. Mud stuck on their shoes. As they ran, some of them muttered, “Ugh, so dirty!”
Soon, the people at the very front reached the end of the pathway. There, they discovered that this section of the waterfront had been cordoned off with metal fencing. A food festival had been scheduled for that weekend, and rows of stalls had already been set up. Again, they hesitated. As they debated whether to take a detour, the riot police fired several rounds of tear gas in their direction. Canisters exploded near their feet. And just like that, no one spoke of decorum anymore. Fleeing for their lives, they scrambled up the fence, pushing and pulling one another. The metal spikes tore through the fabric of their clothes and even their flesh. Chan Yuek was slashed in her thigh and arm as well. There was blood on the ground. The tear gas smoke seemed to follow them. Behind her, someone screamed, “Anyone have an asthma inhaler? Help!” Ah Mak told her not to breathe in. He soaked a kerchief with bottled water and pressed it over her mouth and nose.
A frantic, graceless, uncivilized flight had taken place in this modern city. Chan Yuek had never experienced anything like it before. It was like a disaster movie. By the time they were at the IFC mall, her heart was still pounding. All she wanted was to cling tightly to Ah Mak, and for him to hold her just as tightly.
In the months and years to come, Chan Yuek had often wondered, if that afternoon, had she managed to tell Ah Mak, “Please don’t go,” would everything have turned out differently? Later, would he say it back to her instead of quietly accepting the breakup?
* * *
—
Chan Yuek stumbled away from the bus stop. The evening temperature had dropped. A wind grazed her light dress. She sneezed. She decided to text Ho Sam and asked if he had gone out today and whether he was safe. After a while, her phone buzzed.
“All good here. I stayed home prepping for a class. You?”
“Prepping for what class?” She knew he was a teaching assistant at a school but not much beyond that.
“The director asked me to try teaching a summer class for junior high students. I’m working on a lesson plan.”
“Oh, I won’t bother you then. Let’s catch a movie tomorrow?”
“Sure. Afterward, you should swing by to see Hanta. He misses you.” Attached was a photo of his gray British shorthair. The cat was sleeping soundly on its back, exposing its belly.
She suspected this exchange must have been just one of many chat windows simultaneously flashing on Ho Sam’s phone. That very cat photo had probably been sent to multiple women, along with the same line: Hanta misses you. To borrow a term her friend had used, Ho Sam was one of those “gentlemanly fuckboys”—no lies, no games, just indiscriminating flirtation and naked desire for those who were looking for the same.
They had met on a dating app about two weeks ago. Chan Yuek was new to the app, and Ho Sam was the first guy she ended up meeting with. He appeared mature for being just two years out of university. Chan Yuek was pleased that the dating profile pictures didn’t lie: He was just as good-looking in person, with fair skin, large eyes, and a dimple that appeared on his left cheek when he smiled.
When their eyes met, a cliché flashed in her mind: his eyes looked like a deep sea.
When they tried to have a conversation, however, it didn’t go so well. Though Ho Sam was outgoing and talkative, they shared hardly any common interests. Both had backgrounds in the humanities, but for Ho Sam, it was just a way to make a living. He cared about social systems and believed that in this age of technology, big data determined everything. He liked to say, “Being earnest is a sure way to get hurt.” Chan Yuek, on the other hand, like every other artsy youth, was drawn to film, photography, and literary and philosophical theories. She longed for romance and world peace. She was still new to dating, and didn’t yet understand that making conversation on first dates was like a game of catch, requiring intuition to match each other’s rhythm and pace. By design, all that drifting from one topic to another was never intended to expose one’s sincere feelings.
Chan Yuek was grateful when Ho Sam brought up his cat, a near-universal topic of interest among women. When Chan Yuek heard his cat’s name was Hanta, she asked if it was a tribute to the reclusive narrator in Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude.
“Bohumil Who?” Ho Sam seemed embarrassed. He told Chan Yuek he inherited the name when he adopted the cat. He asked if it was a trendy Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of self-help title. “Isn’t the title a little pretentious?” he joked lightly. “Too loud, and too much solitude!” He clearly had no idea how to deal with this artsy type and was just about to give up when she pivoted the conversation to current politics. This was before the even more dire developments that conditioned people to keep their guard up with strangers. Her breakup with Ah Mak was still fresh, and she desperately needed someone to discuss politics with. She asked him what he thought about the movement.
Ho Sam told her that on July 1, he was right outside the Legislative Council. It had only been three weeks since the Tamar Park crackdown, but the world had changed. In this new reality, a march of two million people was no longer a rarity. Another line was crossed when a martyr emerged. As shown on TV, a man in a yellow raincoat jumped off a building, protesting the government with the cost of his life. As the anger and sadness grew thicker and thicker, many people began to feel that more radical means were justified. By July 1, the anniversary of the British transferring Hong Kong sovereignty to China, a group of protesters decided to occupy the legislature. Ho Sam was there, he said, watching the protesters storming in the building.
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” Chan Yuek said. The way he put it left his involvement open to interpretation. Was he a mere bystander? A sympathizer? She pressed him further.
“I believe that’s enough of an answer for you.” Ho Sam let on his irritation. During this first meeting, Chan Yuek didn’t yet know this about him: He usually avoided people whom he considered rigid and self-serious, especially the “idealistic students coddled within the walls of academia.” In that moment, he just told her bluntly that in the real world, people were bound to disagree about things. There were endless reasons for contradictions and conflicts. Such tensions were the source of fascination and torment, and they could drive the earnest to the brink of madness.
Chan Yuek hated it when people spoke in riddles. In the case of Ho Sam, she gathered then, there was a cruel pragmatism in his way of seeing the world. He was probably a fuckboy too calculative for love. After they parted ways that day, she blocked him. She thought of Ah Mak again. She had wanted to get to know him better. His reluctance to articulate his feelings really frustrated her. She could never quite figure out what he was thinking. But perhaps she preferred his silence to Ho Sam’s riddles.
She met Ah Mak at a film screening. They were both still students and shared similar tastes—everything progressed naturally. Over time, however, their differences became clear. She loved to express herself, whereas Ah Mak was reserved; she insisted on absolute rights and wrongs, whereas Ah Mak was often more comfortable with being noncommittal. More importantly, she believed in a larger-than-life power in verbal communication. Her education had impressed upon her that there was no problem that couldn’t be solved through dialogue; that there was no subject in the world that couldn’t be talked through and made sense of. But she failed to see how this vehement insistence could make her come across as overbearing. Sometimes, it drove people away.
After Ah Mak started working last year, his job was like a speedboat, taking him away from Chan Yuek, who was still safely moored in the sheltered waters of university life. Their schedules were no longer in sync; his tolerance for ambiguity increasingly clashed with her need for moral clarity. She grew increasingly restless, diagnosing his lukewarm responses and indecisive behavior as symptoms of someone already absorbed by the system. A system she intended to resist. Chan Yuek took Ah Mak’s entering working life as a warning: after graduation, she must never become a cog in the machine.
* * *
—
On July 1, Chan Yuek was, in fact, also a bystander of sorts. She had followed the new developments at the Legislative Council closely on the livestream. Many journalists broadcasted from inside the building. After about a hundred protesters breached the Legislative Council Complex, it became clear that they hadn’t agreed on their next steps. Inside the legislative chamber, as they debated whether to stay or to retreat, a young man climbed onto a table, took off his mask, and called out to the crowd.
“We have nothing left to lose. There’s nowhere to retreat. If we pull back now, the certain fate for the student and movement leaders is being arrested. Civil society will suffer a destruction that it won’t be able to bounce back from for the next ten years,” he said. “Please stay. Let’s occupy this place together. The more people in this chamber, the safer we all are.”
